FreeBSD 5.0 Notes

Below are notes of my experience with FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE. Many things have changed, and I've worked out solutions to many of my issues, but other issues remain for me.

pccardd

PC Card support seems good, except for one problem. pccardd won't run. The kernel sees the devices and doesn't need any help allocating drivers (at least for the two network cards I use). However, I need dhclient (the DHCP client) to start when the card is detected. pccardd is supposed to do that, but it isn't running.

When I try to start it, I get an error message that telle me there are no pccard controllers. At first I thought this might be because 5.0 has CardBus support now, and pccardd doesn't grok it. But now I'm wondering if, because I'm using the new automagical /dev filesystem, that the device nodes are missing. Supposedly, that /dev filesystem thingie be configured, I need to read up on that and see if I can add the device nodes, and maybe that will solve my problem.

ios::noreplace missing from gcc 3.2.1

FreeBSD 5.0 comes with gcc 3.2.1 now, instead of 2.95.4 that comes with earlier releases. That hasn't caused me any troubles, and obviously all of FreeBSD could be built with it, but my brother is using it for development in C++. One of his programs handles mailboxes, and it creates a lockfile. The C++ way to do this is with the ios::noreplace flag. His program compiled when he wrote it, but when I upgraded his machine to FreeBSD 5.0, that line of code no longer worked. Poking around the source, that whole part of the library has been completely re-written, and ios::noreplace and ios::nocreate are both missing. We aren't impressed.

UFS2 Not Available at Install

The release notes suggest that there is some simple toggle that I can use to create UFS2 filesystems at installation time (sysinstall). There is not. However, it will let you manually twiddle with the newfs options, and I added the newfs option (I think it is -O2).

On the other hand, I though UFS2 was necessary for some of the cool new filesystem features (snapshot dumps and background cleaning). I'm not sure anymore that it is needed for that.

Getting Linksys Broadcom Wireless to work ...

using NDIS drivers?
Again